Two part question here, i’ve been on and off photography for about 8-10 years and while i don’t know everything and anything about my camera, everything about composition and editing, I feel i know enough to edit photos the way i like and making them decent compositions. at this point, should i start thinking about investing into a laptop/iPad and lightroom rather than relying on the free portions of editing apps to create better edits?
I’m definitely an amateur as well. I really enjoy using Lightroom to process my photos. For that alone I’d recommend it. My shots look much better with a little processing. Additionally it is a database. I use keywords to organize my shots. It is great to quickly search for all my ski shots, or shots with Frank in them or summer backpacking shots in California, etc.
I take 3 months off every year for a cycling trip and use Lightroom mobile on my iPhone to process shots for my blog. I can do the basics on my iPhone but it is far far less than with Lightroom classic and my laptop. If your laptop has sufficient processing power I’d use LR classic.
Have fun with LR, shooting in raw and processing in LR has been the biggest improvement to my photography.